Monthly Archives: November 2014

Recently I was called in as an independent third party in a dispute between a modeler and a stakeholder. The stakeholder said “I have significant experience in both my application and modeling and I know what I want, but I am not getting it.” The modeler said “I have been modeling for 30 years and I know exactly what the stakeholder needs, but he just won’t listen to me!”

It was obvious that they weren’t communicating well, but not so obvious why two such highly experienced people were at such odds. So my first question was “What was written in the functional specification?” You might guess the answer … “What functional specification?”

My second question was “Well then, what did the contract say?” The answer again was unfortunately along the lines of “I’ll give you $x to model this” (refer to a recent blog of mine on this topic).

So in hindsight it is pretty easy to see where the misunderstanding came from. They had not agreed on model scope, approach, animation, units of measure, or even basic modeling objectives! Of course that leaves lots of room for experienced professionals to interpret the problem in totally different fashions and end up with totally different approaches to the problem.

Many people think that doing a functional specification (FS) is a waste of time. But a FS is rarely extra work. Rather it is work that must be done at some point and if it is done early it can have tremendous positive impact on project success. A FS is almost never a waste of time — even if the project is cancelled as a result of the FS, it is better to have “wasted” a few hours on the FS, rather than to have wasted significantly more time on the project before enough was learned to cancel it.

So who was right? I don’t even need to discuss the technical merits. In my perspective it comes down to two things:

1) A modeler who embarks on a journey with little clue where he is heading (an FS) is setting himself up for failure. An experienced modeler should know better.
2) While it is certainly the responsibility of the modeler to attempt to educate and persuade a client of the best approach, ultimately the customer is the one who decides if the project is successful, not the modeler. So in the end, the customer is always right.